online Presidential selection quizzes

[tagryn]

I have reservations about the "2008 Presidential Candidate Matching Quiz" - mine was exclusively Democratic before any Republicans with no exceptions, and most everyone I've seen online who's posted their results came up the same; little variation = poorly worded questions, more often than not. In sociological jargon, I think the quiz has validity problems (e.g. it isn't properly measuring the values it is supposed to be measuring).

However, I managed to find one that was even worse.

Look at MPR's presidential match quiz. Three of the five answers in Q1 are identical. That tells me someone was being sloppy when they put it together. There's other problems like that throughout the quiz. I thought it might be Firefox messing up the HTML, but no, it comes up the same in Internet Explorer.

Comments

[jilara.livejournal.com]

I noticed the poorly worded questions as well. As a third-party person, I was quite surprised to see how I was heavy duty democrat in the choices.

There is a perverse skill to writing carefully-crafted quizes/surveys that will essentially deliver the results desired by the creator. And don't think that's not how quizes and surveys are put together. I remember writing some of those on "quality" issues when I was at a certain megacorporation. The bottom line was that they wanted it to give the impression their quality was far better than it was, and they also wanted it trackable without looking like it was. (Just think, their receiving Malcolm Balbridge award for quality had something to do with this effort...) Politics is even easier, as the issues are already being spun and fogged...